Business, beauty, and research are all aspects of the complex relationship
between Harvard and the Cienfuegos Botanical Garden. Pictured above in
descending order (ca. 1920) are houses of employees of the Garden; a view
from the door of the Garden's main house; and workers loading sugar cane.

About three-quarters of an hour outside the Cuban city of
Cienfuegos, at the "Pepito Tey" sugar complex, is the
Cienfuegos Botanical Garden.

In contrast to the sugar mill's clangor and sweat, the garden
welcomes visitors to a soothing setting of palms, orchids, bamboos,
and myriad other tropical plants.

Though run by the Cuban government today, the garden has
Harvard roots. And with the gradual thawing of relations between
the U.S. and Cuba, new possibilities for collaborative teaching and
research may now, after more than a generation, be on the horizon.

The enticements of this neotropical Garden of Eden suggest
questions as well as contentment. Why so splendid a facility so far
from the beaten track? How did the Garden come by its more than
two thousand tropical species? What purpose does it serve? What are
the origins of Harvard's connection?

Our story starts in Boston and in Cienfuegos itself. Cienfuegos was
founded in 1819, 300 years after Spain first colonized Cuba. Sugar,
then the dominant cash crop, was traded by local and foreign
merchant firms including Boston's E. Atkins & Company. Edwin
F. Atkins, the founder's son, first visited Cuba in the 1860s in
order to master the family trade. Atkins gradually assumed complete
control over the Cuban operation.

Atkins began his business life in a commercial world based on
consignments and commissions. Sugar production, however, was
already in flux.

Mechanized refineries required heavy investments. Shifting
tariffs, population movements, and industrialization in the Northern
hemisphere, and emerging competition from both European beet
sugar and Pacific sugarcane created an ever-changing structure of
sources, prices, and markets.

Cuban planters, who grew the sugarcane, also had to adjust to
endemic civil unrest and the abolition of slavery. Many were
unsuccessful.

Atkins, despite strong misgivings, settled an intractable debt
sometime around 1880 by taking over the "Soledad"
sugar estate. He invested heavily in additional land and technological
improvements. He wintered on the estate, often without his family,
and forged one of the island's most productive sugar complexes.

The process was not without risk: banditry, brushes with armed
bands allied to every possible faction, and repeated seasons of arson-
damaged cane became almost commonplace as the island chafed
under Spanish rule.

Through his high-level connections in both Washington and
Havana, Atkins championed greater Cuban autonomy within the
Spanish Empire, hoping that would end the unrest.

He later quickly accepted North American occupation as a portent
of peace and stability. His thoughts almost as quickly turned to
intensifying Soledad's sugar production, with Harvard as one of
the vehicles.

In 1899, Atkins donated $2,500 to the University to compile a
comprehensive bibliography on sugarcane and to fund a
"traveling fellowship in economic botany," whose
recipient was expected to conduct research that would improve the
island's cane production.

By the turn of the century, Harvard's annual reports
regularly referred to the "Experimental Garden in Cuba,"
which was soon renamed the "Harvard Experiment Station in
Cuba."

The Garden's initial mission was to grow sugar cane from
seed rather than cuttings, a first step toward the larger goal of
developing more productive and resistant strains. Other work
addressed cane diseases and pests, and tropical food crops.

Despite the Harvard label, during these early years Atkins
provided all of the Garden's land, labor, and funds. The main
focus remained practical agriculture, though more and more
specimen plants were collected as well.

The tax benefits of charitable donations, in tandem with his
continuing satisfaction with the Harvard connection, induced Atkins
in 1919 to arrange a long-term lease of land and to pledge an
eventual endowment of $100,000 -- the "Atkins Fund for
Tropical Research in Economic Botany" -- for what became
known as the "Atkins Institute for Tropical Research."

The "Harvard House" for visiting researchers and
students was built soon after, and aggressive programs to obtain
more plant species were put into place. Atkins himself died in 1926,
though both his widow and his son-in-law, who followed him as
president of the Soledad Sugar Company, continued to support the
Garden.

The decades following Atkins' death saw programs at the
Botanical Garden meander along a course defined by several
overlapping tensions.

Civil unrest remained endemic, though several decades of relative
calm followed the revolutionary movement of 1933. Increasingly
stringent labor laws mandated higher minimum wages, limitations on
non-Cuban workers, and a reduction in the work week to forty-eight
hours. Ever-increasing costs became the norm. The Garden was also
vulnerable to flood, drought, and hurricane.

By the mid-1930s, the Garden routinely overspent the income
from the Atkins endowment, despite repeated additional gifts from
Mrs. Atkins and from the Claflins, her son-in-law's family.

Programmatic fuzziness exacerbated the financial tensions
between Garden and gown. Was the Garden's destiny to become
a first-rate tropical arboretum? Or was its purpose to conduct
original research? In the latter case, should its focus be practical or
theoretical, or should it simply respond to requests as received?

The Botanical Garden engaged in a variety of pursuits. Wartime
appeals from Washington led to experiments with rubber trees.
Research on tropical food crops reflected Edwin Atkins' initial
wish that the Garden address the island's general welfare.

Rare botanical specimens were exchanged with facilities all over
the world. Tree saplings were cultivated for reforestation efforts at
Soledad and neighboring estates, and landscaping plants were
dispatched to the new U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay.

By the 1950s, Harvard was using the Garden for summer courses
in Tropical Botany. The Garden became a local tourist destination as
well, provoking worried accounts of thirsty plant lovers' needs
for potable water and more general supervision.

The Castro Revolution, and the following downward spiral in U.S.-
Cuban relations, provoked an extended hiatus in the Harvard
connection.

Operations were gradually reduced as of 1959. Expatriate staff
members sought other jobs, and the University relocated three anti-
Castro employees off the island. Direct financial support ceased as of
September 1961, and an office in Cambridge closed soon after.

The Cuban government took over the facility, and has managed it
ever since.

As in most good stories, that of the Cienfuegos Garden abounds in
ambiguity and paradox. The principal actors -- Edwin Atkins,
Harvard University and the Cambridge-based scholars who
administered the Garden, on-site superintendents and staff, Cuban
officials and employees, the Soledad estate and its managers --
operated with agendas that were sometimes complementary and
sometimes at odds. The shifting backdrop of war and revolution,
depression and prosperity, hurricane and drought, likewise wove a
tapestry that this sketch can only begin to describe.

The Botanical Garden's story also resonates with matters
very much on our minds today. Issues of contributions and control,
of motivations and authority, surfaced throughout its history.
Through what formal mechanisms and interstitial arrangements
were the Garden's programs and activities established? What of
the byplay between the University's distant administrators and
the founder-cum-benefactor's intimate proximity?

The scientific and ecological issues were no less complex. Could the
Garden be coherent as its projects by turn pursued better sugar cane,
improved food crops, reforestation, and the largest possible collection
of tropical plants? Were these activities even compatible with one
another?

Finally, what of the Garden's political and social impact?
Harvard's enclave within Cuba can be perceived in any number
of ways. The Garden was highly responsive to requests from Soledad
Sugar and from the American government. It also conformed to
Cuban law and attempted an, at least, limited engagement with
Cuban needs.

The Garden's administrators, researchers, and professional
staff were overwhelmingly white, male, and expatriate. Cubans were
most visibly present as laborers, many descended from slaves. The
interplay of race, class, and nationality, while unremarked, was
inescapable.

These are the sorts of unanswered and perhaps unanswerable
questions most satisfyingly pondered in Cienfuegos, at the joint
venture tourist hotel which bills in dollars for lodging in its fenced
compound overlooking the bay, and whose daily busloads of
European visitors are hailed with free drinks and minimally-clad
dancing girls.

Contemporary Cuba is a vortex of paradox. Ecology vies with
economics, revolution with reality, ideology with iconoclasm,
dependence with development. The puzzles are much the same as
those posed by the Botanical Garden.

Rather than simply a historic curiosity, the Garden thus partakes
of issues that are both continuing and crucial. Like so much in
today's Cuba, it is emblematic as well as idiosyncratic.

-- Dan Hazen, Widener Library's librarian for Latin
America, Spain, and Portugal, visited Cienfuegos for an international
conference of
historians and archivists in March 1998.

The above article was adapted from an article published in the
David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies publication
DRCLAS News (fall 1998).